Pioneers in the Protection of the Vulnerable in Nursing Homes

About 20 years ago — 25 years into their practice — partners Mark Kosieradzki and Joel Smith began to litigate cases involving abuse of nursing home patients, cases they say other lawyers found too expensive to take on.

“What these corporations that own nursing homes were doing to people was outrageous,” Kosieradzki said. He cites abuse and neglect resulting from understaffing, with owners interpreting regulations for minimum staffing to mean maximum. “Overworked staff were just as much victims as underserved patients.”

Kosieradzki and Smith pioneered in the field, not only in litigating their own cases, but in educating the bar across the country, for example with their 2020 book “Nursing Home Cases: When Caregivers Stop Caring.”

They saw the business model of health care in America as enabling corporations to exploit tragedies of human suffering to maximize profits. From cases that Kosieradzki, Smith and their fellow awardee Kara Rahimi have won judgments, they have returned to the federal government millions of dollars for which nursing home owners falsely billed Medicaid.

Kosieradzki and Smith have prevailed in almost 90% of their cases and have had to turn down 600 cases a year.

“I don’t take cases in which a family asks me how much money they can make by suing a negligent nursing home owner,” Kosieradzki says. “I want to help them get what they really want from the owner: accountability, an apology, a pledge to investigate the tragic loss, and a promise never to let such abuse happen again.

“When owners do that, lawsuits drop by 60 to 70%.”

Smith’s advocacy was critical in achieving a change in Minnesota law concerning wrongful-death litigation by survivors of a relative. Now families can pursue justice even if a harmed relative died later of unrelated causes.

Kosieradzki and Smith are retiring and handing off their dozen or so pending cases to their long-time colleague Rahimi, who will carry on the legacy of their work as a new member of the Ciresi Conlin firm.